[WikiEN-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

[Peter Ansell]

On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is in response to the somewhat silly English-language press we've
> had lately. I'll be sending copies of this out to the sources of
> recent articles on the subject that got it precisely backwards.
>
> The following is, I understand, technically accurate, based on text
> from Amgine, Phillipp Birkin (de:wp), Jimbo and Mathias Schindler (I
> think), and comcom discussions (press relations being part of that
> job). Corrections welcomed - you have about five minutes.
>
> (and geni, I expect you to ask how this makes the new patrollers' jobs
> easier - by having what's effectively a feed of new-editor and
> anonymous edits, is what I was thinking of.)
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ
>
>
> * What is changing?
>
> We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
>
> We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where
> all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of
> articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language
> Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked
> from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20
> website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August
> 2006 - http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the
> readers.
>
> The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors
> will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a
> 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The
> idea is to enhance the *reading* experience, and free us to enhance
> the *editing* experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general
> public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
>
> Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in
> editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many
> concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and
> vandalism - this will assist their work and we do not expect new
> delays.
>
> We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions
> of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a
> high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the
> German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has
> already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have
> sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other
> language Wikipedias.
>
> These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail
> as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow
> us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the
> front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
>
>
> * When was this proposed?
>
> Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late
> 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a
> very high-quality article
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake) very
> quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed
> how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost
> the start of the project, in 2001.
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What version would new editors be editing if they found an error on a
page and attempted to edit what they thought was that page?

Semantically I would think they would have to update in turn from the
latest available version in the database. There could quickly be
problems with multiple versions of the page branching, and being hard
to combine, if they were not editing the latest version.

Peter Ansell